


Muse

by GloriaMundi



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Gen, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-01-06
Updated: 2003-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-06 04:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/49526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Muses are fickle as hell. (Inspired by gossip, glossy magazines and Robert Graves.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muse

I have been -- I am -- a successful artist. Age is not pertinent. Some artists are like mathematicians, burnt out by thirty, their best work behind them. I hope I won't be one of those. And nearly all artists -- writers and painters, of course, but also film-makers, game designers, cooks and concert pianists and comic-strip hacks -- agree that muses are capricious, unreliable, seldom there when they're needed.

You know the Muses from centuries of art: nine lithe-limbed young women, frolicking in a mountain meadow somewhere in Greece, light pouring out of them into the lesser vessels of poets, sculptors, musicians. They're an essential element of the European artistic tradition: inspiration comes from somewhere outside the self. It comes and goes. Given the muses' gender and the sordid subtext of the artist/muse relationship, it's no wonder that women have had a hard time doing art, as opposed to being it.

That's not relevant now, though. Traditionally, muses are nine in number, young and lovely and female: but tradition doesn't matter any more, and today, no doubt, there are more muses, in any number of shapes and sizes and colours and genders. They still fuck artists and then fuck them over and leave them dying in splendid poverty. They are mythical beings, but that doesn't stop them being real. They are fickle as hell.

* * *

He said the same. When we met he'd just returned from a year or so spent filming on the other side of the world. He should have been exhausted. He should have been barren, sunk in someone else's vision, acting out someone else's creation. It was a long time before I watched the films and saw the light shining out of him: not as literal or as visible as a cinematographic effect, but it was tangible light, and he was the source. By then I'd spoken with his director and his colleagues, and I understood that he hadn't been merely a passive actor, a nobody in a costume. His fire had infused their shared vision, helped to make it what it was.

And now ... now he was with me.

I felt like Marie Curie discovering radioactivity. Yes, the sex -- of course -- was good. Better than good. He set me on fire: hands, tongue, cock everywhere, moulding me like warm wax, shaping me inside and out.

I didn't just lie there. I sought, and found, the switches that made him temporarily all mine, arching up towards me, calling my name. And it always was my name. I knew he had left someone behind, lost but not forgotten, down there on the far side of the world. I didn't know who it was for a very long time.

We were good together. Not just in bed. He was painting, huge sprawls of layered colour, and working on the photographs he'd taken. Light poured out of them, too: colour and light. Colour used like light, colour blocked and reinvented. I learnt just by watching him look at his subjects. I've been around artists since I was a little child. I know that the important thing is what you do with what you see.

Sometimes I would feel sick, overfull of everything inside me as though I had gorged myself on light and hue and the way that things fitted together. Sometimes I even mistook that feeling for physical nausea. He'd sit there with me, stroking my back, soothing and silent. I would like to say he never tired of feeling my skin, my hair, my fine bones under his hand. I fascinated him.

At those times he would suggest a walk in the woods, or find me raw fabric and calligraphy pens, or stretch a new canvas. I never liked the things I vomited forth at first, but sometimes they turned out well.

* * *

Sometimes, he would leave me, without a word, to myself. I felt better for it, as though I could breathe again. I didn't like his absences. He would never tell me where he was going, when he was going, why he was going.

"There's a difference," I said to him once, "between being free and running away."

"I'm not running away. What do I need to run from?" He wasn't looking at me, though my hand was in his. He was examining the grain and whorl of my fingerprint, detaching it from me, stealing it with his attention.

"Me?" I grinned.

He didn't smile back. He always listened to what I said, rather than how I said it. "You can't keep me all to yourself."

"Do you mean I'm not enough? Is that why you keep disappearing?"

"I need more than this."

"Do you mean sex?" I said bluntly.

"It's not always about sex," he had said to me once, before we slept together for the first time. At the time I'd thought he was trying to turn me away, tell me I was too young, tell me my father was his friend. Later I appreciated that he had been his director's muse: I knew enough to see that there had been nothing carnal there.

"I don't mean sex." He let go of my hand, having stripped both gesture and hand of any significance, and looked at me seriously. "Would it matter if I meant sex?"

My hand sat on my knee like a small, alien thing. "I don't know," I said. "Is there someone else?"

"There's nobody like you," he said, and I knew it was true and meant nothing. There was someone, someone who was nothing like me. He was leaving in the morning, and I thought it might be the last time. Either way, the argument was pointless.

* * *

That wasn't the last time. He came back, unheralded, weeks later. He stood in my studio, admiring the painting I had finished that morning: the colours bled together, and somewhere in there was a white horse among trees. There was something different about my work when he was away. It was further from what I wanted, too close to my original ideas. It was empty.

"How were the premieres?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Fine."

I didn't know how to ask the next question gracefully. "This other person that you ..." Well. Whatever. "Who matters to you. Was she at any of them?"

There was a quality of stillness about him that I wished I could capture. "He," he said, head tilted back slightly, measuring me. "And, no."

When he was away from me, he was away: alone or not, he was not with me. It didn't matter that someone else might turn their head and meet his gaze, hear his voice, answer or remain silent when he spoke. I was not jealous of him, going towards someone else. But I needed him to stay. I needed him to be ...

There was a crack of silence between us after that, because on that single subject we had nothing more to say.

* * *

Eventually, inevitably, he told me he was leaving.

"You knew this would happen," he said gently. We were drinking tea in the garden, and he was sitting on the damp grass, far enough from my chair that I could not reach out to him.

"I'm not ready for you to go."

He said nothing, waiting. Blue eyes looking at me, seeing into me, seeing too much.

I wanted to scream, bleed, paint, throw tea at him. "You were the muse. You were my muse."

That tilt of the head again, like an attentive bird, like someone who doesn't understand the language, or doesn't speak it well enough to answer. "We were together for a while."

He wasn't returning the compliment, wouldn't say that I was his muse, too. Like "I love you." He hadn't said that until he meant it. He didn't say it now. He didn't believe in empty words, or empty art.

"You're an artist," he said eventually. "You find inspiration in everything around you. You don't really need me."

The word 'really' made me angry. "And he does?" I snapped. Fuck. I hadn't meant to bring other people into it.

His expression was bland enough to hide any number of reactions. He might be offended. He might be laughing at me. When he spoke, his voice was quite level, quite unconcerned.

"I didn't inspire him to create anything." He looked down at his hands for a moment, turning them over as though they were unfamiliar. "Just ... himself."

* * *

From time to time he'd suggested, while we were together, that we took a vacation in Europe. It had never been the right time, and there was something cluttered and dark about Europe in my head, something dirty and strange and antique. Now, as if he had been freed to wander -- as if I had kept him from leaving -- he seemed to be roaming aimlessly, moving from city to city in countries I knew for their wine or their monuments or their politics.

A month after he left, I had a postcard from Milan. He wrote about the weather. The picture on the front was garishly typical, a clichéd view of a cathedral. I studied it for a long time, looking for some message in the surreal blue sky, the patterns of figures in the square, the squat heaps of the towers.

The next postcard came from London, all gaudy lights and blurred shapes. He'd been to the theatre, he wrote: a friend in the lead role. "Spreading the inspiration good and wide," I said mockingly to the cardboard, having by then a very good idea of who he'd been to see.

The last postcard arrived the day before Easter, which was late that year. Some abstract painting, a postcard from a gallery in some small Danish town: his scrawled signature covered half the artist's name. It was more colourful than the others. "I'm here with an old friend, a colleague from the films," he wrote. "He used to paint. I'm convincing him to start again."

I put the postcards in a drawer, where I would find them again when I was ready. There wouldn't be any more for a while.

I didn't need to start again. I carried on.

-end-


End file.
